Modern consumer and industrial packaging often includes reinforcing tapes or tear tapes as part of their construction. Various tape dispensers have been devised to dispense such tapes into corrugator and packaging equipment. Over the years, various methods have been introduced to increase the efficiency and speed of these tape dispensing systems.
For example, one way to increase efficiency is to increase the size of the tape rolls being used. By using “oversized” or large rolls of material the amount of tape that can be dispensed before needing to stage additional rolls can be increased. However, these oversized rolls of material typically weigh more than 40 pounds, which exceeds the weight that many companies allow workers to safely handle or lift and may exceed the weight restrictions regulated by the government. In such cases, the material would be required to be handled by a mechanical lifting apparatus when movement or staging is required. For example, Marotech, a Canadian company, has a two-tape system called MaroCrate™. The system provides rolls of material that weigh approximately 100 pounds each. This system is described in more detail in Canadian Patent 2,447,498 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,121,497.
In addition, because of the increased inertia, larger rolls are harder to accelerate and stop. Moreover, these larger rolls experience excessive tension during acceleration and tape overrun during braking. During splicing with the current MaroCrate™ technology, operators must slow the corrugator to approximately 600 feet per minute to prevent splice failures and even at that speed, roll-to-roll splice failures can occur.
Another limitation to using relatively large rolls of material is that if a quality defect is found on one of these large material rolls, the scrap or waste factor potential increases dramatically.
Other systems include one or more staged rolls to increase efficiency and reduce down-time of the machine. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,917,327 (“the '327 patent”) to Asbury et al., the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses a system for automatically splicing together the trailing end portion of a spool, or roll, of tape to the leading end portion of a new spool of tape without interrupting the dispensing process. To prevent the tape from breaking under the strain caused by the inertia of the new spool of tape (which is initially at rest), the tape path is provided with a tension-control mechanism. In response to an increase in tension in the tape, the tension-control mechanism moves to shorten the length of the tape path, thereby relieving the increased tension in the tape. As the new spool comes up to speed, the tension-control mechanism, under the influence of a biasing mechanism, returns to its initial position to increase the path of the tape length.
Another known method of splicing the trailing end of one roll of material to the leading end of another roll of material is the multiple roll splice system known as the Adalis RPT® System, which is manufactured and sold by Adalis Corporation. The RPT® System dispensing apparatus is relatively long in length because of the required horizontal staggering of various rolls, which can be a significant disadvantage since corrugators typically have limited space available to place the tape dispensers when running.
The Adalis RPT® System approach also does not have a means to prevent the active roll of material from inadvertently and prematurely pulling a staged roll of material into motion before the active roll is depleted of tape, which can occur if an imperfection on the running tape, such as a glob of glue, catches the splicing device on the staged roll.